


Solipsism for Beginners

by Margo_Kim



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-20
Updated: 2010-09-20
Packaged: 2017-10-31 10:01:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/342749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Sam was a better person, maybe he'd have dreamed a better world, but there's a dead girl looking up at him and it's all his fault.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Solipsism for Beginners

**Author's Note:**

> Gen, contains reference to murder and prostitution, non-explicit, as well as a helping of existential angst. Inspired ages ago by the meta challenge at [](http://1973flashfic.livejournal.com/profile)[**1973flashfic**](http://1973flashfic.livejournal.com/) and took a slight turn to the left. Constructive criticism welcome.

The day started with a body in an alley. A nameless corpse on a nameless street, connected by the nameless men who streamed through looking for nameless women. A kid had found her. He’d had a maths test he hadn’t studied for, so he skipped to spend the day outdoors instead. By the time he calmed enough to call for help, the rainclouds that had threatened the city for two days burst. The water fell fat and heavy; it slapped the city awake.

Sam bought an umbrella on his way to work. It kept his top half dry, but the wind blew the rain sideways; he got to the office half drenched and thoroughly steamed. Cuban heels lifted him further from the puddles, but the flares were determined to drag themselves through the mud. He entered the CID, full of other half wet coppers, and pointed himself at his desk, soured for the day thirty minutes into it. Gene, with his knack for bad timing, chose then to sweep out of his office and swept Sam back out to the streets. Murder.

Chris called the rain a lucky break. “She’d have looked really bad without it, wouldn't she, Boss?” Rain made her the cleanest stab victim Sam had seen in a while. She sprawled on the cracked pavement, 17 at the oldest. From the right angle, the old cliché was true: she really did look like she was sleeping. That, the alley, her too-short skirt and her too-high heels, those pointed to another cliché.

She would have been new to her job. All the long-term working girls Sam had known aged a year a day. This girl, quiet and pale, still had baby fat. Sam tugged her skirt down to cover her thighs.

The team batted around ideas. A violent pimp. Dissatisfied punter. Late night creep getting his jollies by playing Jack the Ripper. Suddenly, Gene laughed. He pointed to the washed out alley, to the washed out corpse. “Don’t need to worry about forensics this time, eh, Sammy boy?” No, Sam supposed, they didn’t, but he told Ray and Chris to search anyway. The alley was empty; Ray was smug.

They canvassed the surrounding area. Did you see anything? No? How about you? Same answers from every stop. We didn’t know her. We didn’t see anything. We’re not involved. Not our problem. They finished by noon. The work left them without a shred of physical evidence, without a single witness, without even her name.

Phyllis shouted at them over the radio. Another murder, two miles east. A wealthy middle-age housewife killed in her home, her husband vanished. A case so cut-and-dried the who, what, and why were already filled out for them. Gene sent the girl to the morgue and Sam to the Cortina.

“I’ll keep working on this.”

“Don’t be a div, get in the car.”

“I can do more here.”

“The day’s too short to cry over every dead prozzy, Sam. Get in the car.”

Sam stayed like they both knew he would. He crawled up and down the alley, looking for the revelation they’d missed, looking for anything that meant anything. He even dug through the rubbish bins nearby and got nothing for it except sticky hands and the smell of spoilt food clinging to him.

Sam remembered his rules, the ones he tried to beat into Chris after he’d given up on the rest of them--don’t personalize, don’t generalize, don’t assume. But as he leaned against the cool roughness of the bricks, the wind blew the rules away from him. The rain washed them to the gutters.

She had stood in the middle of the alley, away from the main street. She’d tucked herself into the shadows where she couldn’t be seen. If the perp was a client, she would have taken him here. If he struck for other reasons, maybe he’d followed her.

He saw her leaning against the wall like him, recovering from a stranger’s brisk intimacy. Maybe she’d counted her money or took a drag, but in Sam’s mind, she combed her fingers through her long blonde hair and looked at the sky. She’d grown up in the country with a proper night sky, stars in the black and all. Here in Manchester, the night never dimmed past blue and any stars she saw were just the Space Race’s runners.

She’d run to Manchester. Someone would have told them that dreams came true in cities, and she was never short on dreams. Life surprised her here. Work was rare; goods were pricy. The city left her alone. She took solace in the euphoric glitz of a nightclub named after the owner. She taught herself to dance, first for fun, later for money when the savings ran out.

She would have seen the girls on the street and thought _not me_ , until one night when she badly needed them the tips just wouldn’t come. The boy in the corner had been looking at her all night, and he wasn’t too bad so she walked over and took him out back. His hand was sweaty in hers. She overcharged him, something she wouldn’t always manage, but neither of them knew the going rate for a blowjob. When he zipped himself up and handed over the cash, too shy to look at her, she thought that hadn’t gone so badly.

She promised herself that it was only once, but the bills piled up. She celebrated her seventeenth birthday hiding from a man who loaned her fifty quid and expected double that back. Nowadays, she needed more money. The track marks dotting her arms testified to that. So she hit the streets one night and that was that.

Or not.

Or everything unfolded some other way and all he’d done was stitch together a hundred girls’ identities so he could satisfy himself with an answer. He wrote her an unhappy story because he thought that was the truth of her life. This world of his was already overflowing with misery. He owed her better.

Sam walked back to the station and made no effort to dodge the rain as it washed the streets clean. Annie tsked at him when he came in soaked. “I always knew you didn’t have the good sense to come in from the rain.”

Always demanding the room’s attention, Gene banged out of the Lost and Found with a triumphant shout of “pub”. The husband confessed. Case closed, justice served, happy times for drinks and drunks. Annie beamed at him. “Not bad, eh?” Sam cocked his head. “We got the bad guy. Aren’t you happy?” Sam gave her a tight smile. Hers slid off her face. “Why aren’t you happy?”

“I’m happy,” he said, but she wasn’t anymore. Sam felt vaguely bad about that, but spoiling Annie’s good mood was hardly the worst thing he was responsible for today.

“Is this about the other case? We can work on it more tomorrow, see if something comes up, yeah?”

Nothing will come up. The case went cold minutes after the murder. Sam nodded. “Yeah. Yes. We’ll do that.”

Annie looked around. The den ignored them, swept up in the bustle of a day’s neat wrap-up. “Is it, you know--” She tapped the side of her head. “Is it that?”

“Am I feeling mental, you mean.”

Annie didn’t look away. “Are you?”

Sam turned to watch Gene pull the husband out of Lost and Found, the grey-haired man in the bespoke suit screaming that the bitch had had it coming. “In my house! In my bed!” Spittle flew while the man writhed.

“Oh, shut it,” Gene said and slammed his fist into the man’s gut. The wind knocked out of him, the man spluttered as Gene dragged him down to the cells.

“Annie,” Sam said, “you can control things in dreams, right?”

She crumpled. “Oh, Sam.”

He laughed a bit like he found it funny. “Then I must not want things to change that badly. I mean--” He gestured at the room. “Why else would this be here?”

“Don’t do this, Sam.” He looked back at Annie and she shook her head. “Don’t.”

He had to. “If I dreamed up this world, did I make the bad things in it?”

“Yes,” Annie said. He flinched. She gave him a little smile. “It’s a good thing that you didn’t then.” She squeezed his arm and leaned close enough to whisper. “It’s a good day, Sam. Just let it be a good day.” Sam looked away. He stared at the ceiling as Annie pulled on her coat. “Are you coming?”

“Soon.”

She looked like she wanted to say something, but settled on, “Suit yourself,” and left. Sam watched her go the same way as the rest of them. He turned on his heel and went the other way.

In this dream of his, Sam felt least comfortable but most at home in the morgue. Even in 1973, a room of the dead came with a familiar amount of sterility and order. Sam blended in to the white panels and antiseptic.

Oswald draped a white sheet over her naked body. Cause of death: “Well, I’d say it was the knife stab to her stomach.” And then, because the body still lay between them, Oswald added, “Poor thing.”

“Are there any identifying features?”

“Not unless needle marks are an identifying feature.” Oswald snapped his gloves off, the conversation done. It was six o’clock and the office was emptying. “She’s in the system now. If someone reports a missing girl matches her description, you’ll know.” Sam nodded. He jumped when Oswald clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Get some rest, eh? You did your best.”

Sam, at a loss for words, nodded again and left.

He hadn’t planned to go to the Railway Arms, but when he looked out from under his umbrella, he found his feet had taken him there unbidden. After the dark of the rainy night, the pub’s brightness blinded him. He squeezed his eyes shut and willed the world dimmer.

“You’re letting the rain in, mon brave.”

Sam shut the door. He squinted and found Gene at the bar. He sat next to him and ordered a whiskey, both out of habit. Gene leaned back, his drink in hand, and surveyed the room. “Do you know what I like?” he asked, all fake nonchalance.

“Drinks. Tits. Laughing at people who are different.” Nelson put Sam’s whiskey in front of him. Sam took it with a thankful smile.

“My job.”

“That was my fourth guess.”

By now, Gene was proficient at ignoring Sam. “I keep my streets safe. I bang up the bad guys, wear the white hat, keep my streets free of the filth. Best job in the world, Sammy.”

Sam paused, his glass halfway to his lips. “I’ve already joined the force. You don’t need to recruit me.” Gene shot him a dirty look. Sam drank. “I’m not interested in hearing your dissertation on policing tonight. I’m just here to drink.”

“Tough. You’ll just have to multitask.” Gene turned toward Sam; his bulk blocked out the rest of the pub and suddenly Sam felt alone with Gene, even as he struggled to hear his words over the din of the crowd. “Don’t think no one’s noticed your little snit. You haven’t been right all day--less right than normal anyway--and I won’t put up with you sulking about for however long you plan on doing this.”

“I’m not sulking,” Sam said, but really, there was no way for a grown man to say that sentence without sounding petulant. Sam took another drink to bolster up his pride.

“You’re not the only one who gets sad at a murder,” Gene said. “You’re not the only one pissed off that the bastard’s probably going to get away with it. And you’re a good enough copper to know that we can’t piss away our time on every dead-end case that passes under our noses.”

When Sam answered, he spoke to the space by Gene’s head, not trusting himself to handle anything that could be misinterpreted as concern on Gene’s face. “I’m not playing white knight. I’m just doing my job.”

“Bullshit. You’re torturing yourself. You need to forget her.”

The words landed sharp as a slap; anger gave him the courage to look Gene in the eye. “Why? Because she’s inconvenient?”

“Because, Ptolemy, the universe doesn’t revolve around you, and the last time I checked you weren’t the dead tart we found. Don’t make her death your tragedy. You know as well as I do once you start punishing yourself for other people’s crimes, you’re done.”

Gene leaned in, close enough Sam felt as much as heard the words. “So the next time you plan on making yourself miserable wringing your hands over some body, remember that you’re not that important to the world. Murderers did fine before you came here and they’ll do fine when you go.” Gene jerked his head at the door. “Now, piss off. Go cry in the shower. Write in your diary about just how mean the world is and get it out of your system because tomorrow there’s going to be something else and I can’t have your bleeding heart dripping over my crime scene.”

His speech finished, Gene leaned back. Sam felt like he could breathe again. Around them, the pub pretended not to be watching. Annie in particular seemed fascinated by the menu in front of her. They expected him to be angry. Sam did too. He just felt tired. He swirled the last dregs of whiskey in his glass and raised it to his lips. “It is my fault she’s dead,” he said into the glass and sipped.

“I’ll bang you up for murder first thing tomorrow.” Gene stood. “Get up. I’m driving you home.”

Sam knocked back the last of the drink. “I’ll walk.”

“It’s raining. I’ll drive you.”

“It’s fine.”

“Get in the car.”

Sam walked home like they both knew he would. The rain wasn’t so bad now and the wind had died down, but Sam still got wet all over again. In his flat, he peeled off his soaked clothes and collapsed naked on his cot. If he had his way, there wouldn’t be rain. The days would be full with sunshine and the nights with stars. There wouldn’t be puddles in the sidewalk or grit on his palm or blood on the pavement.

She deserved a happier story than the one Sam gave her. She deserved a happier ending than the one she got. She deserved more than an empty funeral and an open case file. But in the truthful moments before sleep, when the conscious walls of the mind tumbled down and the secret parts lay bare, Sam wasn’t presumptuous enough to think he could give her any of that. He couldn’t even give her a name.

If he dreamed that night, he didn’t remember the next morning. The cold woke him too early and scattered any fragments of dreams back to the corners of his mind. He shivered in his nakedness and dressed himself in the now familiar polyester and leather. When Gene pounded on the door, Sam was ready. Today was a new day with a new body in a new alley, the same story looped back and played over again with fresh details but the same plot. Maybe this time they would get the bad guy or maybe this time they wouldn’t, but they had to try anyway before the next body passed by like parts on a conveyor belt that moved too quickly. And if it was his fault, all he could do was try and keep up.

At least it wasn’t raining anymore.

Sam opened the door and went back to work.  



End file.
